La Fontaine wrong? You’ve got to be kidding! We all know the tragic ending of the frog that wanted to be bigger than an ox. It swelled and swelled thanks to to thoughtless ambitions until it simply exploded. But what happens when an ox wants to be as agile as a frog? Can you really […]

A quoi donc doivent ressembler les leaders de demain? Bonne question. Et beaucoup de nos clients se la posent. Confrontés à la complexité, la diversité, à l’incertitude grandissantes du monde actuel et au changement de génération, ils s’interrogent sur ce qui pourrait contribuer à bâtir un socle culturel solide et cohérent. Et quoi de plus […]

At the heart of the future… I invited Melissa, a senior expert from an international high technology company, to dinner four months ago. I’d always thought it was exciting to be at the heart of something that could make the difference in our developed countries: not economies of scale, not doing more with less, but […]

Three months ago I had dinner with my friend Joan. She seemed pretty depressed. Since she had recently taken a CIO position in a global organization, I thought it probably had something to do with her engagement and frequent travels. But I was wrong. “It’s always the same story” she told me. “At the end […]

One o’clock in the morning. The crowd thinned out from the bar. I was putting my sax back in its box, after a few hours of jamming with the band, and it suddenly struck my mind how similar my musician and my consulting life can be (although with jazz, you get to bed later!). As […]

When my kids were very young, I used to tell them stories. I did it at night to help them cross the line between my story and their dreams. During breakfast, I would read them a short story to wake them up for a new day at school. Poe, Buzzati, Vian and others. It worked […]

The acquisition has been signed! The big multinational (let’s call it Huge Inc) has finally acquired the smaller niche-market company (we’ll call it Small Inc) in order to pursue its strategic diversification. Small Inc teams are interested but not overjoyed even though it means much needed development resources. After all, many of the Small Inc […]

Overheard in the company restaurant the other day where two regional HR managers were having lunch: “Here we go again. Another questionnaire we have to ask people to fill in. It seems like we just had one to fill in a while ago. We’ve got so much to do, who has time for this? And […]

A few years of providing 360° Leadership Feedback to our clients, we have discovered that you can get all sorts of reactions, from extreme denial on the one hand to authenticity and discovery on the other. The one thing that can make the difference is the quality of the feedback, and this depends on the […]

Like mergers, acquisitions and other forms of strategic alliances, international joint ventures (IJV’s) are growing fast. Like these other alliances, failure rates are high. And like in these other forms of market entry or growth, while the business must become global, management and people remain culture-bound, if not local. It’s a new corporate culture In […]